


A Well-Loved Cat

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Armitage Hux Needs A Hug, Armitage Hux is Not Nice, Artist Armitage Hux, Bad omens, Blood, Blood and Injury, Blow Jobs, Cashier/House Husband Armitage Hux, Consensual But Not Safe Or Sane, Domestic Violence, F/F, Horror, Hux might be out of his depth, Huxloween, Huxloween 2020, Inspired by Stephen King, Is spaghetti horror a genre?, Kylo Ren Being a Little Shit, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Logger Kylo Ren, M/M, Murder, Murder Mystery, Non-Chronological, Possessive Kylo Ren, Possible Character Death, Unreliable Narrator, by little shit I mean abusive asshole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:42:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27179420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: It was Mark Twain who wrote ‘A home without a cat -- and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat -- may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?’ Rey remembered Ben quoting that bit at her more than once when she asked after Millie. He’d usually pull his phone out and show her a picture of the little orange furball, too. By Twain’s reckoning, Ben Solo’s home had been perfect AND it could prove title. At least before the incident. He didn’t ever talk about how his husband disappeared or how he was probably dead, a victim of something much stranger than a robbery gone wrong. He hadn’t broached that subject even with family.He sometimes told the story of how Hux up and left him.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Rose Tico
Comments: 14
Kudos: 111
Collections: Huxloween 2020





	A Well-Loved Cat

**Author's Note:**

> Hello welcome to this little abomination, my latest unloved problem child. The tense switches between Ben telling a story and Ben thinking to himself, and I hope I haven't made a mess of it. TW for general fucking unpleasantness lol, I think the tags cover it but details in bottom notes.

It was Mark Twain who wrote ‘A home without a cat -- and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat -- may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?’ Rey remembered Ben quoting that bit at her more than once when she asked after Millie. He’d usually pull his phone out and show her a picture of the little orange furball, too. It was a bit insufferable, how often Ben quoted books that no one else had read. He went through them like they were household essentials, picking up battered paperbacks at yard sales and finishing them that night. Classics, pulp fiction, anything he could get his hands on.

By Twain’s reckoning, Ben Solo’s home had been perfect _and_ it could prove title. At least before the incident. He didn’t ever talk about how his husband disappeared or how he was probably dead, a victim of something much stranger than a robbery gone wrong. He hadn’t broached that subject even with family. He sometimes told the story of how Hux up and left him, but he always timed it to avoid questions at the end if there were new folks present. Folks who hadn’t been in the shadow of the mountain the year prior and read the horrors in the local paper. His audience usually laughed. Hell, Rey usually laughed, and she knew the awful ending he left unsaid. Ben was a good storyteller.

“We finished up before dusk and the chopper brought me back down,” he’d start. Ben was a logger. It was hard work, and tiring. When he got back to his truck he always headed straight home. Some of the other boys went to the cantina for beers and darts, but Ben had a greater prize waiting for him at home. He and Hux had a little place by the flooded quarry. It was small, a bedroom and a bathroom with doors on them but the rest of it all shoved into one open room. But it was a comfortable home, and clean. Hux kept it in good shape. He could never pick up forty hours a week at the local petrol station’s register, and so he spent the rest of his time as a certified house husband. They didn’t need more money. To the casual observer, Armitage Hux might have seemed discontent with his life -- Rey had worried about it after Ben bounded into his parents’ house one night with a surly redhead in tow and introduced them all to his new _husband_. It only took a couple years before Rey was certain Hux simply possessed an innate ennui that would fester even if he were a high-society millionaire. Hux’s ill moods were no reflection on what he thought of Ben. It was an artist’s temper, and an artist Hux was. His sketches were really quite incredible, when you managed to coax him into showing them off. Precise lines interlocking on top of each other to create a whole picture.

Ben would come home and greet Hux as he walked in the door and shed his coat, Millicent the cat twining about his boots and screaming her own hellos. Ben would growl about the garage door -- Hux was prone to leaving it open, and they never locked the door inside it to the house. It was an invitation to theft or worse, leaving the garage door hanging open all day. Hux would snip back at him and Ben would give him a kiss, and they’d eat dinner. Usually they ate on the couch. Sometimes they slept on the couch. Rey had let herself in on Saturday morning more than once, intending to take Ben fishing, and seen them tangled together, Hux in one of Ben’s oversized shirts and not much else.

Sometimes they managed to get themselves into bed, and Ben would read while Hux drowsed with his head on Ben’s broad chest, listening to the rumble of his voice more than the words he was saying. Millicent curled up between them, purring. She loved Hux and he loved her, but she loved Ben even more. She still did. She entered the picture in their final year of marriage. Ben had gotten her as a present for Hux, after he spent the better part of two years bitching about being lonely during the day. Left to his own devices, Ben might have chosen a dog. It was evidence of Ben’s watchful eye that he picked up a feline for his husband -- he recognized that Hux was not the sort of person who wanted all the work of a puppy. Ben joked sometimes that the biggest division in the world was between people who favor dogs and those who favor cats. He hadn’t thought of himself as a cat person until recently.

On October 26th, Ben came home and the garage door was open as usual. Their other car, Hux’s little four-door affair, wasn’t in the garage. That was unusual, but not unheard of. It was possible that he had wanted to run to the store for something he needed to make dinner. It was before suppertime: Ben had gotten hurt. His saw kicked back wild and hit him in the face, or at least he thought so. He didn’t remember anything before the hospital. His face was stitched and taped up something awful and starting to bruise, but it didn’t hurt too bad. He had a bottle of strong painkillers in his coat pocket for when it did. As it was, he was feeling good enough that he was planning on asking for his usual welcome-home kiss.

Ben parked the truck to the side so that Hux could still get his car in the garage when he came home -- the folks at the hospital had told him not to drive, and only checked him out when he lied and said he had a ride, but the drive home had been uneventful so Ben reasoned it was alright -- and got out, striding around the truck’s hood to shut the garage door.

There was a crow on the gravel of the drive, wings splayed. It’s head was crooked at a sickening angle. Must have flown into the house and died. Ben paused, looking at that crow and feeling cold even though the day was mild. The trifecta of unusual events was complete: Hux was gone, Ben was marred, and there was a dead fucking bird on the drive. Ben looked up. Four more crows perched on the roof, looking down at him like gargoyles. They made their little sounds at him, a sort of crackling in their throats. He shut the garage door and went in the front, calling out immediately for Hux even though he’d seen the missing car. His voice sounded hollow in the empty house.

Well, not empty. Millicent yowled at him fiercely, the sort of sound that meant she was hungry. Ben added another tick-mark to the deepening sense of unreality that was flooding his life like looking through warped glass. Millicent was the most spoiled cat in the world. She was acting like she hadn’t been fed this morning. Ben went to the fridge, almost tripping over Millicent as she trotted along with him, chirping eagerly. He opened it just to verify that the open tin of cat food was gone -- there’d been a half left, and Hux would have used it this morning. But it wasn’t. It still sat there, foil over the top. Ben pulled it out and scooped it into Millicent’s bowl. She didn’t even wait for him to finish before she was digging her face in, purring loudly while she ate.

Ben stood up and eyed a note on the counter. It was plainly Hux’s handwriting -- he wrote his E’s a funny way whether they were uppercase or lower, like C’s with a line through the center -- but it was sloppy and rushed, as though his hands had been shaking.

_Ben,_

_I know you’ll get this first thing because you always set your keys here while you’re making coffee. I want a divorce.There’s nothing you can say or do that will change my mind. We’ve had too many fights. Ugly ones. The good doesn’t outweigh the bad. I can’t live like this any longer. I want you to know I always thought you were smart and kind. Kinder than me. Don’t prove me wrong. You’ve noticed my things aren’t packed -- I’m out for the morning. We both know that’s for the best. I’ll see you tonight. Be careful, Ben._

_All my heart,_

_Hux_

At this point in the story, if not before, Ben would explain that he never called his husband by his first name -- Hux would sometimes tolerate ‘Armie’ if he was in an especially cheerful mood, but never ‘Armitage’. Ben might be making up the contents of the note. He sometimes embellished his stories. But, Rey thought it sounded enough like Hux to be plausible. It was his way of putting things: a bit dramatic and matter-of-fact all at once. Self-righteous and ominous. Yes, it sounded like Hux.

After he read the note, Ben turned it over, and nearly fell on his ass. He’d turned the page over in the first place because the letter was written on Hux’s good drawing paper. On the backside, a sketch of a crow stared up at him with accusing black eyes. Crow number six of the day. Ben’s head swam. He tried to remember the morning, whether anything had happened that might warrant this, whether he’d read this note before now at all, and his mind hit a wall. He could go no further. His face was beginning to throb dully. Millicent trilled questioningly and Ben dropped the note in favor of petting her.

“I hated her at first,” Ben would divulge to any listeners. “I think just because Hux loved her so much. There, it’s out. I was jealous of a cat. And it seemed like she hated me back, at first. You know how a dog can bring you your slippers? Well, Millicent would _puke_ in mine. Stuck my foot in it the first time. I wanted to take Millicent right back where I got her then. I had the little box out and everything, just fuming. And Hux _cried_. I’m talking an absolute shit fit! You’d have thought I was asking if I could pretty please strangle the little beast.”

It had been love at first sight for Millicent and Hux. They were like star-crossed souls reunited at last. From the very beginning, Millicent would curl up in Hux’s lap while he sat at his desk drawing, and she would lay on his chest on the couch, looking up at him with these big soulful eyes and purring like she needed her oil changed. Crazy love.

“We were crazy in love in the beginning, me and Hux. Crazy burn-the-town-down-for-you love. I thought we always would be, to tell you the truth. I’d have staked my life on it, and Hux...I thought he’d stake his life with mine. Millicent felt like she would be the beginning of the end. I introduced one other hungry mouth to the mix and suddenly Hux was hurling insults at me after the little bitch puked in _my_ shoe. I told him that, I said ‘she puked in my slipper!’”

“Oh, the cat puked in your shoe?” Hux scoffed. “So now off with her head. Do you hear yourself?”

“You stick your foot in here and see how you like it.” Ben was getting mad at that point, but getting mad at Hux never did any good. If there was one thing on planet Earth that Hux knew how to do and how to do _well_ , it was to escalate an argument. If Ben had a king, Hux always had an ace up his sleeve. If Ben got irritated, Hux got pissed. If Ben got pissed, Hux emptied the proverbial missile silos and scorched everything in a hundred-mile radius to ash. It wasn’t worth it to get mad at Hux, but every time they started to bicker Ben forgot that until it was too late.

“Let me tell you something,” Hux hissed. “Living with you is no walk on the fucking beach, either, _love_. You stuck your foot in a little spit-up? Try being me. Try sleeping with your back in that wet come-spot every night because your husband takes up the whole bed, and hardly getting any sleep because he snores as loud as a freight train. Or getting up to take a shit in the morning and splashing your ass right down into cold water because the goddamn lid’s up.”

“Hux--”

“And the toilet hasn’t been flushed either, he must think the fucking thing’s _automatic_ , so there you are sitting with your crack in a bowl of piss and then you realize _your feet_ are in it too because your man can’t aim worth a fucking damn when he’s drunk. And then after you shower stale piss off your body you can mow the lawn with the push mower because he tore the other one apart when you asked him to change the fucking oil, and then by the time you come in and need another shower the hot water’s out but we ‘don’t need a new water heater’ which has nothing to do with the massive spat he got into with the man at the store, I’m sure. You’re apoplectic because you stepped in drool _once?_ Don’t make me laugh.”

“It wasn’t drool,” Ben growled, but he knew he was beat. When Hux won, it was always a decisive victory. Ben didn’t bother to mention that he was sure that Millicent had done it on purpose. Had lurked nearby and probably hidden under the bed to watch the fallout. If he said that out loud Hux would be trying to book him with a psychiatrist, but Ben _knew_ it. The way that he knew when the other loggers were talking about him and he knew that his mother liked Poe Dameron at the office better than her own son. He never mentioned that part out loud, either, just like he never mentioned the blood. His dislike of psychiatrists outlived his marriage, and the last thing he needed was his family badgering him about seeing one any more than they already did. By this point in the story any listeners would be chuckling at Hux’s hysterics.

“Millie used to growl at me, and hiss too, but the growling bothered me more. Cats hiss when they’re scared, but growling? How dare that little orange bag of bones and guts growl at me when I sat next to my husband on my own fucking couch. She never bit, but she batted at me a few times, sometimes with her claws out. The fucking _nerve_ of it. I’d say to Hux, ‘Listen to that. She’s growling at me.’ And he’d stroke her little head like he hardly ever stroked mine, and he’d say that someone ought to tell me what for.”

Ben did his best to make friends with Millicent. Maybe Millie tried to make friends with him too, he never could tell with cats. He insisted on being the one to feed her, so she would at least need to be around him for her meals. She did venture over for food, though she growled as she ate if Ben petted her. Ben never kicked her, even when she dug her claws deep into his arm once after he tried to pick her up and left dripping scratches. He had wanted to draw his boot back and jab her with it that day, teach her who was boss, only Hux was there and saw Ben’s desire on his face and had given him a look that could have boiled water. So Ben didn’t.

Months passed, and with time Millie stopped growling and then stopped ruffing the fur on her back up into orange spikes when Ben came near. Eventually she put one paw out onto Ben’s leg from her spot on Hux’s lap while they were watching _The Price is Right_. One paw turned into half a cat and then the whole cat, and then she was purring in Ben’s lap instead of Hux’s.

“The way cats are, they don’t care one whit whether it's in their best interests to get along with you. It was _my_ house, but as far as she was concerned she might as well be queen of the castle. She didn’t wisen up about that. It was loving Hux that did it. I think she’d have hated me forever if I kept trying to befriend _her_ , but we both were in love with him. She could see that.”

Winter came and went and then Millicent was winding around Ben’s legs when he came home, initial reservations soothed. Sometimes Ben threatened to swat Millie off the table the next time he caught her there, but he stopped after Hux grinned at him -- it was only a grin by technicality: his teeth were showing -- and said Ben would find himself three fingers short if he tried. There was only one more big Millicent-shaped argument between them before Hux left. Cats get manic, and one evening Millie went racing around the house and then jumped up on the sofa and clawed the curtains.

“Scared the hell out of me. I was trying to read. I was just lucky the little shit didn’t put holes in _me_. I said, ‘Goddamn it, Hux’ because Millie wouldn’t understand if I cussed her out, so it had to be him.”

“What?” Hux intoned, still standing over the stove. He didn’t even deign to look.

“This crazy bitch just put holes in the curtains.”

“As if you didn’t put a hole in the door.”

Ben _had_ done that, the very first year they were married, but it wasn’t as though he hadn’t replaced it after, and he knew Hux had enjoyed watching him install the new door shirtless. They’d been fighting and Hux had locked him out of his own damn bedroom, and so Ben beat the door until a section of it flew out in the center and he could reach the doorknob to unlock it. Hux had looked unimpressed, never flustered by Ben’s outbursts. It irked Ben to see the same steady acceptance applied to Millicent. He had thought it was his alone, a marker of how deeply Hux loved him. Well, apparently not, since the furball got the same treatment.

Ben told him so. “You don’t love me. You don’t love me any more than you love this little shit machine.”

Hux turned, wide-eyed. Shocked at last. “ _Ben!_ ”

Ben looked at him, seething, and Hux looked back, and then his eyes flicked behind Ben and that was too much. Even now Ben didn’t have his full attention. Hux was worried about the fucking cat. Ben whirled round and made a grab for Millicent, and then Hux was shrieking. He threw the spatula in his hand at Ben. He threw it _hard_ , hard enough to make Ben jump when it struck his back. Millicent squeezed under the couch, her tail an orange bottlebrush, and then was out of sight. Ben turned back to Hux and found him in the living room. He’d left the food burning on the stove and rushed over, his face pale. Ben grabbed him instead of the cat and then they were tussling. It wasn’t the first time. It perhaps wasn’t even the most vicious. Ben was bigger, but Hux fought like a rabid dog. He always had. He _bit_. Ben yelled when he felt Hux’s teeth sink into his shoulder, throwing him on the floor. Ben bit him back, right on his neck, hard enough to bruise, and Hux went limp, breathing hard, tears streaming down his face.

Hux said something that Ben couldn’t hear over the roar of blood in his own ears, but he thought it was, _Don’t hurt her_. Ben had him there on the floor while black smoke wafted out of the kitchen, ripping his jeans open so roughly he broke the zipper and sucking an orgasm out of him like poison.

“Turn the stove off and I’ll repay the favor,” Hux said after, because he never offered anything for free. Ben complied and then sat on the couch where Hux pushed him, letting Hux unzip his jeans and pull him out and work him to full hardness. He had half a stiffy already, more from the fight than from having Hux writhing under him.

Hux’s fingers were almost gentle, his thumb rubbing into the slit of Ben’s cock, spreading precome. Ben bit his lip. Hux had always been very good at this. A seasoned slut by anyone’s definition of the word. Hux leaned in and engulfed him with the velvet heat of his mouth and Ben moaned. Ben’s cockhead hit Hux’s soft palate as he bobbed down, and then Hux adjusted his angle slightly and took Ben down his throat. He swallowed and Ben let his head loll back on the couch. The sensation of Hux’s throat constricting around him was perfect. He sucked greedily at the head when he bobbed back up, and then playfully nipped him, making Ben jump.

“Hey, don’t be a bitch here,” Ben rasped. It was his substitute for _bastard_. He’d only called Hux that once, and the frigidity Hux maintained for a week afterward warned him off of it.

“Shut up. You’re lucky I’m not packing my bags,” Hux snipped at him, licking a hot stripe up the underside of Kylo before swallowing him down again.

“As if -- _ah!_ \-- as if I’d let you, _hell_ \--” Ben bit down on the next moan flooding his throat. Hux was better than him at giving head, and while he knew he was lucky now to be the sole recipient -- the gleaming ring on Hux’s left hand evidence of that little contract -- it also stung his pride. Ben hissed and plunged his hands into Hux’s hair the next time Hux backed off to suck on his cockhead. It felt _too_ fucking good, and Hux knew what he was doing. He knew what he could do to a man. Knew from plentiful experience, but Ben didn’t like to think of that. He thought of their first night together, how Hux had done everything he asked, even crawled to Ben’s bed on his hands and knees. The lamp in the corner illuminated his pale skin in bright white and purple shadow, and made his hair glow like spun copper. Such a display was not something Hux would entertain now. He’d sniff and turn his nose up at the idea. Ben gave him a ring and what little ingratiation Hux was capable of faking had melted away. But the memory...Ben held that close. With Hux’s mouth on him and the image of Hux’s green eyes looking up at him on a very different night in his head, Ben came.

The food Hux had been fixing was charcoal, so Ben made boxed mac and cheese and they ate seated on the couch, something mindless on TV. Millicent came out eventually and Kylo scratched behind her ears the way she liked as an apology. When they slept that night they were tangled so closely together as to be one thing, inextricable. He left the sex and the tussling but not the spatula-throwing out of the tale when he told it. “I thought that everything was smoothed over, but a couple months later he was gone.” And then Ben would crack a smile and say, “Anyway, if your husband likes the cat more than you, you might come home from work one day to an open garage door and an itemized list of your faults on the counter.”

He told Rey the story again, sans his certainty that Millicent had targeted him in the beginning and sans the juicy details of the night Hux burned dinner. Rey requested it when he visited her new apartment. She’d just moved in with her girlfriend. Rey had asked Ben to tell it in part because conversation had lulled at the dinner table and in part to try and make Rose warm up to him -- after all, it was funny, in the way some of life’s worst moments are. But Rose had never really liked Ben, and she didn’t seem amused now. She didn’t chuckle when Rey did. Rey worried that Ben could almost feel Rose disliking him, coming off her in waves. If Rey could feel it, then certainly Ben could, just like he’d felt Millicent disliking him. When dinner was over, Ben thanked them both for the takeout and then got up, and Rey protested him driving. He’d had a few more beers than her, and no talk about their difference in size would convince her he was fine. Rose waved them out and Ben climbed into Rey’s Jeep with her.

When they pulled up to Ben’s empty house, he hesitated to get out of the car. “In a week it would have been our sixth anniversary,” Ben said. Rey’s mind whirred unpleasantly, unsure whether to offer pity or stay quiet. “His father’s putting a marker up in a cemetery out on the coast. Fucking rotten old son-of-a-bitch. He called me to tell me he was doing it. Hadn’t bothered to call his own son in six years but he called yesterday. Said we’ve got to consider him dead.” Then Ben began to cry. Not just to cry. He _sobbed_. He bawled so hard that Rey’s pulse jumped, and she was afraid that the pent-up grief would kill him somehow. She cursed herself for asking for the story -- it was her fault Hux was on Ben’s mind tonight.

Ben rocked in his seat and slammed his hands down on the plastic of the dashboard, a storm inside a human body sitting in the passenger seat of Rey’s dusty Jeep. She patted his shoulder. His skin was hot even through the material of his t-shirt. He looked at her, eyes black and burning and twisted purple scar garish in the headlights reflecting back off the closed garage door. For an instant Ben looked like a man Rey didn’t know. Then he came back.

“I miss him,” Ben said, his voice so thick that the words were hard to make out. “I just miss him so goddamn much. I come home and it’s no one but me and the cat, and she’s crying and crying and then I’m crying. I can’t sleep. I can’t _read_ , I can’t...can hardly eat.”

Rey hugged him awkwardly, hard to do in the car. “Hey,” she said. “We’re here for you. Me and Luke and--” she had been about to rattle off Ben’s parents, but they weren’t speaking much anymore, to Ben or each other. “And Rose.”

“I think he’s alive somewhere,” said Ben. His voice was still thick and hitching, on the cusp of breaking, and Rey knew he didn’t really think so. He was telling her what he wanted to believe.

“Sure,” Rey said. “It’s possible. There was no...body.”

“He got the hell out of here and went back to the coast in that dismal rain and back to--” Ben cut himself off and bit his lip, and then looked at Rey plaintively. “Prostitution is legal there. The night we met, he...we...well, there it is.”

Rey blinked. It was hard to reconcile her memories of proud and starched and buttoned-up Hux with her vague media-fueled ideas of a prostitute. She nodded, accepting it. There was no reason why Ben would lie about it.

“He had a whore streak in him. I don’t mean he slept around on me. He didn’t. But he had a knack for it, and he could be back in one of those places.” Ben stopped, nodding to himself, looking out the windshield with vacant eyes. Maybe imagining Hux on a bed in the back room of a seaside brothel, wearing nothing but cheap and salacious underthings, whoring but not dead. His car by the side of the road in the woods meaning nothing. “I can believe that if I want,” Ben said, wiping at his eyes with the back of his arm.

“Sure. You bet,” Rey said. She wanted to leave, but she couldn’t just toss Ben out like this. He looked ready to walk in and slit his wrists with a kitchen knife.

“I _do_ believe that.” Ben lied. “I believe it.”

When Rey got back to the apartment, Rose was already in bed. The sheets were new -- they hadn’t had a queen size before. Rey had picked them almost as a joke. They were dotted with little pink roses. Rey’s Rose was awake still, the lamp on and a book in hand. She set it aside when Rey came in and undressed. Rey sniffed the shirt she’d been wearing and tossed it on a chair for later use. It was still fresh enough. Rey slid into bed and stared at the ceiling a while, looking at the shadows in the powdery popcorn coating. Just when she was about to ask Rose to put out the light, Rose spoke.

“I know he’s your cousin and all, but I think it’s weird the police didn’t look a little closer at him after Hux left.”

“They asked him questions. Not because they thought he did it. He was never a suspect, Rose.”

“And you think that’s the right of it?”

Rey turned to look at her. “Ben was at work.”

“Do we know that? He doesn’t. Didn’t he get a reprimand after? Skipping too many days. He complained about it at Leia’s before they even found the car. How many days did he skip with you?”

“He loved Hux.”

Rose grunted out a hateful, skeptical sound. Rey wanted to yell at her, to tell her how Ben had cried tonight, but she didn’t. Rose wouldn’t trust Ben’s tears anyway.

“Maybe you ought to call the police then, honey. Tell them you’ve solved it.”

Rose turned out the light and they lay side-by-side in darkness. When she spoke again, her voice was apologetic. “You know him better than anyone. He just weirds me out sometimes, but if you say he’s a good guy then he is. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Rey curled up next to her and Rose snuggled in, falling asleep fast. The new apartment descended into silence. Rey couldn’t follow her into oblivion. She was thinking of Hux’s car with its nose down in a ditch, the outside covered in road dust kicked up from frantic driving. Both front doors standing open and the rearview mirror inside torn off and laying on the floor. The front seats sodden with blood, drying and going tacky and rancid. Blood on the dash, blood on the carpet.

A regular murder scene, except if Hux had actually been murdered it wasn’t there. They had his blood type on file at the hospital from an accident a couple years before -- a fall outside on the concrete steps, ‘clumsy, might as well walk around with a cane,’ Hux had joked, and Rose had narrowed her eyes back then too -- and the blood in the car _didn’t match_.

It wasn’t his.

Perhaps, Rey thought, Hux _was_ alive. Blowing Johns in a low-lit room with sea salt coming in through the window and thinking about what to watch on television when he went home. Disappeared into the spaces between spaces. People do that -- just say ‘fuck it’ and walk out. He could still be alive somewhere. Technically speaking, Ben was right about that. Just because Rey couldn’t think up a bridge between a car with the doors hanging open and mirror knocked down and seats flooded red, and Hux safe somewhere else, didn’t mean that a bridge couldn’t exist. It wasn’t as if they ever found his _body_ , just his car and a shit-ton of someone else’s blood. Hux could be anywhere.

Rey got up to get a drink of water, running the kitchen tap into that morning’s coffee mug and looking at the ghost of herself in the window. Reflections at night were always sort of eerie. The eyes were too dark in the face. No matter how much Hux’s cat had liked Ben by the end of it, Millicent was the piece that wouldn’t click in Rey’s mind. For the life of her she couldn’t see Hux leaving Millie behind. Not a cat he loved the way he’d loved her. She drank her tap water and thought about the sound that cats make when they’re hungry, that mournful crying that almost sounds human.

**Author's Note:**

> There's one police officer in town and his name is Beaumont Kin and he doesn't give a SHIT.  
> You know what? It IS possible that a shady character from Hux's past came in through the open garage and forced him to write that note at gunpoint and then kidnapped him and Hux injured them (our boy always has a knife ya know) and got away, and then didn't come back to try and keep Ben safe. It's POSSIBLE. Isn't it? Ben would like to know.  
> Based off Bad Omens prompt....do omens count if they're for something that just happened instead of something about to happen? The five crows out front signify sickness, the sixth in the drawing turns it into a death omen.
> 
> Also this is fake magic land, they live in Shadow Mountain (any other Mandy fans out there?)
> 
> TW:  
> Ben is an asshole and unreliable narrator.  
> Ben and Hux get into a physical fight and it is implied that happens frequently. No one is hurt and it turns into consensual sex.  
> Ben threatens to hurt Millicent on several occasions but never does.  
> Ben asserts that Hux used to be a prostitute. He has difficulty accepting Hux's sexual past without jealousy.  
> It is implied that Ben may have contributed to Hux's bloody disappearance somehow.  
> It is implied that Ben may have hurt Hux badly enough for a hospital visit in the past, and that Hux passed it off as an accidental fall.


End file.
